Ergonomics has never been a concern for past keyboard designers:
- It wasted the most powerful fingers, the two thumbs, on pressing the big fat space bar.
- It abused the right little finger on pressing both enter and the far-away-from-reach backspace.
- It wasted a easy-to-reach spot on the useless CapsLock.
Key combos are hard to remember and bad to our fingers. Try pressing Ctrl + Shift + P and Ctrl + Shfit + Esc everyday, even the daily-used Ctrl+C Ctrl+V are forcing us to press hard on our little fingers. We should have dedicated keys for those frequent moves.
On the other hand, some keys are obsolete and should have been removed. Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause, Insert. The entire row of function keys are mostly wasted on uncommon actions, like F1 is for opening manual that no one reads, F2 only works in file system to rename files, F4 is only useful when paired with Alt to close programs. F6 to F10 don’t even have dedicated functions, which is unacceptable.
Thankfully, those obsolete keys can become precious real estate as we can remap the key combos on them using AutoHotKey. For example, you can set F1 to F4 to be undo, copy, cut and paste respectively. Here are my AutoHotKey configurations:
Key combos
- F3: Ctrl + F (Search)
Browsing
- Delete: Ctrl + w (Close tabs)
- Insert: Ctrl + t (Insert new tab)
- Page Up: Ctrl + Shift + Tab (Switch tab: up)
- Page Down: Ctrl + Tab (Switch tab: down)
- F2: Toggle tabs list (Using extension: Tree style tab)
- F6: Shift + Ctrl + T （Re-open closed tabs in browser）
Input
- CapsLock swaps with Backspace
- Right Alt -> Enter
- Left Alt -> Escape (Switch to normal mode in vim)
- Enter -> Win + Space (Switch between Chinese and English input methods)
Starting software
- F4: Dictionary
- F7: Terminal
- F8: Text editor
Although the syntax of Autohotkey scripts is hard to learn, it has everything but the kitchen sink. It can help you type hotstrings, auto-click and design macros. I recommend everyone to look into it and pick out some features they need.
However, it is exclusive on Windows and I had a little bit headache to find its replacement on linux. For remapping, keyd is a simple and good enough alternative.